Eyes On Me
by Artemis Day
Summary: The first time Jane Foster and Loki Odinson meet, she's sixteen and he's over one thousand, but they've been together for much longer than that. Some bonds can form across the universe, and come what may, they can never be broken. Lokane.
1. Part One

**A/N: This was written as part of the LokaneDeckTheHalls exchange on tumblr for Janinam. As always, it wound up ridiculously long, and since the third part wound up twice as long as the first two parts, I decided to say 'fuck it' and post them while I'm editing the third part. That will be up on Friday, right after part two, which will be up Wednesday.**

**This story is based on the film, In Your Eyes, which I haven't seen, but it was recommended to me on Netflix, so I looked it up and I thought the premise would make a good Lokane fic.**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

On a cool summer day at the end of the school year, twelve year old Jane Foster goes to the park and plays softball with the neighbor kids. It's the first time she's ever done so.

She gets a hit on her first go at bat, a lucky shot. She breaks into a run, passing first and second base. She's about to reach home when she falls to the ground, clutches her stomach, and screams.

Later on, when she's lying in a hospital bed and the pain has left as swiftly and inexplicably as it came, she will describe it to the doctor as like a thousand knifes plunging into her gut all at once.

She will leave the hospital with a clean bill of health, never knowing of the man in another, higher realm, bedridden himself after taking a blade to the stomach.

* * *

Loki Odinson just wanted a quiet day to himself, in his favorite chair in his favorite wing of the library, catching up on some light reading. He gets precious few days like that ever since he crossed over into adulthood. Now he has responsibilities and Thor dragging him along on hunting trips, and all sorts of nonsense like that.

He wakes up that morning feeling strange, like there's a cloud in his head and a lump in his throat, but he ignores it. That's a mistake.

By the end of the day, he can hardly move. His head is throbbing, and it's hard to breathe. A chill runs through his body, no matter how he bundles himself in his winter cloak or how many heating spells his casts over himself and his chambers. It's enough that a maid come to make his bed nearly passes out. While those he is inclined to call friends laugh at his supposed weakness, Loki has no choice but to wait his ailment out. It takes three days, but at the dawning of the fourth, the cold has left him, and his airways are free.

And he hasn't a clue of the now fourteen year old girl on Midgard, who just spent the last three days in bed with a one hundred and two degree fever.

* * *

Jane is sixteen years old when they first share a dream; he is one thousand and thirty three.

They don't normally sleep at the same time. Jane finds herself walking through a garden more beautiful than any she's ever seen in her life. Her grandmother once told her about the Garden of Eden, where all life on the planet first began. If there was ever such a thing, this would have to be it. She admires a bunch of flowers, deep red in color. She's never seen flowers like this before. They smell heavenly.

Then he's right behind her.

"Who are you?" he asks. "What are you doing here?"

She isn't cowed, like he must have thought she'd be. She's too entranced by their surroundings to be intimidated.

"It's my dream," she says, speaking to a man who would look more in place on the cover of a magazine, in a sharp suit with smoldering eyes.

"_Your_ dream? I must disagree," the man says. "How my mind ever conjured up a little spit of a girl like you, I will never know."

Jane laughs at the gall of him. Little? She is not little. Being short and sixteen does not 'little' make, thank you.

"Yeah, well, how I ever imagined someone as rude and handsome as you,_ I'll_ never know."

She puts on a hard face to mask the embarrassment.

Did she just say handsome?

She wasn't supposed to say that.

Think it, sure. She'd think it all she wanted (and she'd be thinking in a lot in the coming years), but saying it _out loud?_

He hadn't heard that, had he?

Maybe he missed it.

His lips curled into a grin that one could only describe as devilish.

So yeah, he'd heard it all right.

"My dear," he says. He has a silky voice. "It is truly a shame that you will cease to exist once wakefulness reaches me. You seem enjoyably fierce for such a little thing."

There he goes again calling her little. Boy, he's lucky he's not real, or Jane would really give him an earful.

"Likewise," she says.

Then she feels a certain softness creeping up her legs. The garden is replaced with the backs of her eyelids, tinted orange by the sunlight streaming through her window. She's sad to have left the dream behind, and that garden. Maybe even that man and his attitude, too.

She rolls over in bed, on top of one of the childhood toys she hasn't quite let go of yet. On her back, she opens her eyes. A grand golden ceiling held up by massive pillars greets her, and there is no way any of that came from her bedroom.

For a long time, she stares at it, though it's probably less time than she thinks. She's pinched her wrists and hands, but she's not waking up. That ceiling, and the room that it shields from the elements, remain clear, solid, and real.

She closes her eyes again, a last ditch effort. She opens them, and she wants to cry out with relief when her white, cracked ceiling appears, and her ajar door with that Johnny Depp poster taped up is at the bottom of her vision.

She sits up, rubbing a head that feels like it's been run over.

_'That was so weird,'_ she thinks.

_'I must agree.'_

Jane jumps. She almost screams, biting the palm of her hand instead. Her chest heaves, and there's a distinct and foreign buzzing that runs down the length of both ears.

_'Please have better control over your emotions. I believe I just scared the life out of a handmaiden.'_

_'Wha- wha- what the hell is going on?'_

She thinks it, where she should have spoken it. Somehow, it feels right to do it this way.

_'I wish I had an answer, but I'm afraid I'd have to do some research into the matter first. Might I assume that you are a tangible being and not just a fragment of a dream that hasn't ended?'_

The way he sounds, Jane would think he's from a hundred years ago. He's certainly a good speaker, with all his big words and the way they flow together. She almost thinks she_ isn't_ real for a moment. She has to check and make sure she feels the wool of her blankets against her skin to be sure.

"Yeah," she says out loud. Then she shakes her head. _'Yes, I'm real. Are _you_ real?'_

His laughter is rich, if subdued.

_'I am quite real, and if I may, something has to be done about all that clutter in your chambers.'_

Jane blinks. She looks around at the books strewn about and the full clothing bin she has yet to take down to the laundry room.

_'It's not that bad,'_ she thinks, not bothering to wonder why she's defending herself to what has to be a hallucination.

_'I beg to differ. I could never live with such discourse. I'd surely lose my mind.'_

_'Well,_ some_ people don't have bedrooms the size of football fields, okay?'_ she answers smartly.

And then she feels his confusion. She_ feels_ it.

_'What is a football field?'_

Jane sits there, contemplating one of the strangest questions she's ever received in her life, asked in the most bizarre of fashions. There is only one thing she can think to say, in that awkward, stilted way she gets whenever she meets someone new.

_'I'm Jane.'_ She closes her eyes. If she does, she might see that room again, or that garden, or him.

_'It's… nice to meet you,'_ he doesn't sound any more assured than she does. _'I am Loki.'_

"Loki," she repeats it to herself out loud, testing it on her tongue. It's a name she knows from just one place, but that has to be a coincidence.

She brushes the notion aside and holds out her hand. Why she is doing it, she cannot say. It's not like she can shake hands with a voice in her head. It's just this feeling she has that she can't shake. If he can see what she's doing, and understand what it means…

She closes her fingers around the air, leaving space for where a hand would be.

_'Nice to meet you, too.'_

* * *

They talk more.

They talk a lot actually.

At first, their conversations are sporadic, no rhyme or reason to them. He doesn't always feel what she feels, and she doesn't always think what he thinks. Sometimes, he'll take a blow to the head in a training session, and she'll know nothing about it until he tells her days later. Other times, she'll get a paper cut from turning a page too sharply, and he'll wince in pain and rub salves all over his healthy finger until the stinging stops. Sometimes, he'll spend the day angry for no reason and snapping at everyone, only to find that she just got a mediocre grade on her history test and she's in her monthly course at the same time.

He does a lot of reading about what could be happening to them, and so does she. He searches ancient magical tomes while she scans scientific articles out of library books and internet searches. Sometimes, they read of beings with extra senses; people who can speak without talking and see without looking. Jane's books call them psychics. Loki's call them seers. Neither of them believes in that sort of thing.

He thinks Jane will give up first, in those times where he gets flashes of her powerful thirst for knowledge (secretly, he's impressed by it). She's still mortal, and mortals are notoriously lazy and fickle.

In fact, he is the one who throws up his hands, though one would be hard pressed to make him admit to it. He reads every relevant book in the library—and some less so once he gets desperate. He experiments, he tries a mind-blocking spell that she never notices. He makes offhand comments on shared consciousness to Odin and Frigga at dinner, only for them to laugh with him at the absurdity of such a thing.

His understanding of magic is why he's forced to give in. Magic has been with him since the day he was born, and he knows it more intimately than he's ever known another person. Frigga taught him much, but he would never have gotten where he is without natural talent.

This is not magic.

Whatever this is, it's something Loki has never seen before.

While she reads stories of twins feeling each other's pain while living hundreds of miles apart, he lays in bed, not even out of his armor yet, and he listens to her breath and make a sound like humming when she reads something of interest.

As the year wanes, and Jane begins putting the books on metaphysics away, he finds himself taking time out of his daily schedule to close his eyes and call her name.

_'Jane…'_

(Or sometimes, she'll call him.)

_'Hey, Loki, I'm kind of busy right now doing homework. Can we talk later?'_

_'What is the subject? Perhaps I can assist.'_

_'I doubt it. It's English. Do people in your realm know anything about earth literature?'_

He'd told her previously that he was from Asgard, and she'd laughed at him. Asgard is just a myth, she said. Just because his name was Loki didn't mean he could trick her. Then he took her on a tour of the palace halls, and the garden outside where they'd first met (she'd been beside herself with glee that it was a real place). He let her sit in on a session with those few Asgardians who had an appreciation for magic, and by the time he was turning flowers into pigs and showing one excitable young man the proper why to make a book float across the room, he didn't sense from her an ounce of skepticism.

Now he receives questions. So many questions. More than he can count. Everything from the nature of his abilities to the origin of Asgard's advanced technology. She has to know it all.

It's her inquisitive nature more than anything else that keeps them coming back. He leaves the channels open for her whenever she wants another peek into his life, and she does the same for him.

_'We are aware of that which deserves our awareness, and that includes a few works derived from your people,' _he tells her.

_'No offense, but that all sounds a little pretentious.'_

_'I would call it knowing what we like, and not settling for anything less than what suits our refined tastes.'_

_'So you're saying you're pretentious.'_

He smiles, and he feels her smile, too. He likes that feeling.

_'Tell me the book, Jane.'_

Now he feels her rolling her eyes, and also he likes that. There are few things he feels from Jane that he doesn't like.

_'It's Macbeth. You guys have Shakespeare up there in Asgard?'_

_'As a matter of fact, the All Father is a longstanding lover of the Bard's work, and I myself find he makes for good reading.'_

_'You're telling me you can understand this stuff?'_

He thinks for a moment her shock and awe might be feigned, but Jane is not that good of an actor (in fact, she's terrible).

_'Which part are you on?'_

He hears her flipping through pages.

_'I guess Lady Macbeth is having some kind of mental breakdown. She's saying something about a spot, and-'_

_'Ah, yes. Say no more. You are reading the part in which the Lady's underlying guilt over her role in the death of the king finally catches up to her in the form of sleepwalking.'_

He talks about the book, one he's never liked so much before now, and she takes notes and makes an occasional comment. When she's done, he feels relief borne from the end of a hard day's work resonate from her.

_'Is that all?'_ he asks.

_'For tonight it is. Thanks, Loki. You're the best.'_

_'Does that mean you're no longer trying to be rid of me?'_

An empty silence follows. Empty in the sense that Loki can feel nothing from her. It's as if she's completely withdrawn and left him in the cold, but before he can wonder what she's hiding, she returns, and her presence makes his skin tingle.

_'I never wanted to get rid of you,'_ she says.

* * *

It's not always fun and games.

Loki tunes in on a regular day in Asgard's autumn, when the skies are dim and the air is warm. He knows not what the weather will be on Midgard, only based on what Jane tells him. Today, it must be the coldest of winter days. He brushes the surface of the ocean that is Jane's mind, and he feels as though he's been dunked in ice water.

He recognizes her turmoil, and his own heart clenches in fearful anticipation. As always, he ignores how weak he becomes in the face of a mortal.

_'Jane?'_ he calls out, and she doesn't respond. "Jane?" He speaks out loud; sometimes, that hits her harder.

Then he feels her, like a feather against a stone wall, but still clear as day. Years have gone by, and he'd know her anywhere.

_'Hi, Loki,'_ she says, sounding the way he imagines a wilting flower would if it could speak. _'Sorry for ignoring you. I've had a rough day.'_

_'Oh really?'_ he says, like he doesn't care nearly as much as he does. _'Do tell.'_

She's quiet for a long time, and if he didn't still feel her mind there next to his, he'd think he's lost her again.

Finally, he hears:

_'Ryan Lively.'_

Ah. So that's it.

Ryan Lively is the boy who holds Jane's heart. There was one other boy before him who fizzled out in a week, and maybe another one before that. Loki never bothers to commit their names to memory. He only knows Ryan Lively because Jane talks about him almost as much as she does the sky. This boy has such powerful sway over her, for someone she has yet to confess to. For his part, Loki wonders if Ryan Lively is not really a sorcerer out to ensnare Jane and steal her virtue. He said so once, and her response was to laugh and call him 'paranoid.' Loki remains unconvinced.

_'What happened?' _he asks.

He feels a ripple, and knows it to be a sob that just broke through.

_'I- I- saw him today… c-coming out of the locker room. He was making out with Angelina Marconi.'_

There's another name Loki knows, if more vaguely. Angelina Marconi is a girl who thinks intelligence should be mocked and physical beauty is the only standard by which one should be judged. The distaste Loki feels for her, he wishes he could transfer to Jane. He's told her many times that someone like that is unworthy of her time and focus.

(In a way, he's happy this has happened. He has a reason now to say the same of Ryan.)

_'I guess I understand why he'd like her and not me,'_ she says. _'I mean, he was always nice to me, and I thought we were becoming friends, but maybe that was all we were meant to be. I can't exactly compete with Angelina.'_

_'And why not?'_ Loki asks.

_'Well, because she's tall and blonde and she looks like a playboy model, and I'm a short stick.'_

He comes very close to laughing out loud. It stops in his throat and he swallows it back with much difficulty.

_'A stick, Jane? You are certainly not a piece of wood.'_

He feels her go red with embarrassment.

_'You know what I mean!'_

_'Yes, I do,'_ he admits, and he lies back on his bed and he closes his eyes. _'Jane, please go to your mirror and let me see you. The full length one.'_

_'Why should I do that?'_

_'Because I asked you to.'_

She grumbles and groans, but she does as he asks. Loki waits for the moment to align his vision with hers. He's more sensitive to this than she is, he's found. Someday, he'll have to teach her to look through his eyes as well as he does hers.

He waits for the buzz of her right up against him, and then he opens his eyes. His room has disappeared. It's Jane's room now. He sees her rumpled blue sheets and the stuffed toys. The faded glow in the dark stars on the ceiling and the wall full of books.

This is the first time he's seen her in quite a while. She's grown since the last time, in age if not in body. Though she is small, she carries with her a grace that many of her kind lack even in their twilight years. Her clothes do not flatter her body, but her eyes are weighed with depth that none of those little boys she fancies deserve to look upon.

_'There you are,'_ he says, in the same soothing voice his mother used to calm his nightmares with._ 'I can honestly tell you, Jane, that you are more lovely and desirable than all the Angelina Marconis in the Nine Realms.'_

And he means it.

* * *

The next time he sees her in that mirror, it's a much happier occasion, at least for her..

_'It took me forever to find this dress,'_ she says, swishing the skirts around to show off the matching shoes.

_'It's beautiful,'_ Loki says, but he finds that he could care less about her footwear. He's more interested in the tightness of the bodice, how it fits around her small, flat waist and pushes up her breasts. This last birthday, she took her final step from girlhood to womanhood. Though she remains petite, she turns heads wherever she goes (or she would if she dressed like this every day), and Angelina Marconi can't hold a candle to her— not that she ever could.

In the two years since that fool of a boy, whose name Loki can't be bothered to recall, Jane has been through a few more 'crushes' (as she calls them) and had one boy court her long enough that she calls it a relationship. Loki calls it a glorified friendship; that boy never even tried to kiss her.

Now comes the night of her 'senior prom,' which she only cares to go to because Gavin Dickerson has asked her, and there isn't a single girl at school who wouldn't want to be in her place (Loki wishes one of them was).

_'You know, this prom business sounds terribly foolish,'_ he says, as he has said so many times over the last few weeks that he can no longer count them all.

_'I know, it is pretty stupid,'_ Jane agrees. _'That's why I didn't bother with the junior prom.'_

Loki nods. He remembers that night. Instead of dancing to grinding non-music and drinking lukewarm beverages, she walked around town and told him all about the sights and the sounds and the people. She ended the evening in the park, where she told him about the stars. He's never told her how much he enjoyed that night. He didn't care one bit for what she was telling him, it was just to hear her speak.

_'I'm thinking Gavin and I will only stick around for an hour or so. Then we can go hang out with my friends at the anti-prom, or just take some time for ourselves.'_

He doesn't like the sound of that.

_'You mean alone? Just the two of you?'_

_'Well, yeah, what else?'_

She's so casual about it, he could break something.

_'I actually meant to bring that up,' _she goes on to say._ 'I know that you like to look in on me when I'm out doing, you know, stuff like this.'_

_'Social activities, you mean.'_

_'Yeah, that's it. I know you like to do that sometimes, but I was kind of hoping… if you could maybe… I mean, if I'm going to be alone with Gavin…'_

_'You're asking me to stay away for the night,_' Loki says.

She winces.

_'You make it sound so harsh,'_ she says.

It_ feels_ harsh.

_'Don't worry, I understand and I agree with you,'_ Loki says, the words alone ripping at his chest._ 'This is your night to spend with your beau and I have no right to intrude. On my honor, you will not see hide nor hair of me for the rest of the night.'_

* * *

Loki keeps his word, though most would attest that he's not very honorable at all.

He spends the night with Thor and his oafish friends. If nothing else, they are good for distractions. The boisterous pleasure they take in their pursuit of more ale and loose women is tedious at best, but at least he can't hear himself think when they're around.

He tries to interest himself in a story Thor tells about a hunt the two of them went on as boys. He actually enjoys telling his portion of the tale, in which Thor gets himself caught in the den of a bilgesnipe and needs Loki to remove the eggs from inside his pants.

It's when everyone (Thor included) has burst into uproarious laughter over the horrible rashes they had the next day that Loki doubles over in pain.

He falls from his seat, clutching his stomach as something plants itself into his gut over and over again. His ears are ringing, so loud that they might rip themselves apart. His eyes fog, but still he sees Thor bending over him, fearing that his brother has been poisoned, or worse.

"Loki?" he hears, as if an echo. "Brother, what is it? What ails you?"

Thor reaches out a hand.

Loki feels like he's floating, like someone else is in control of his body. He throws Thor away from him, all the way to the other end of the hall. He moves with energy and force that is alien to him.

"DON'T YOU TOUCH ME, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

And then it's gone, and everyone is staring at him, and Thor is picking himself up and rubbing sawdust out of his hair, and Loki couldn't care less about any of that. He only cares about one thing.

_'Jane.'_

* * *

He feels pain first. It engulfs him.

He feels Jane next. It's an odd sort of disconnect he makes between the Jane he knows and the one she is now. He could force his way into her vision if he wants (he's never done it before, but he knows that he could), but that sort of breach in trust when she is in such a state of turmoil is beyond even him.

_'Jane, what happened? Are you all right?'_

That's a stupid question. Of course she's not all right. This woman makes a fool out of him with everything she does. Now she's drying her tears, the ones she's been channeling to him without either of them realizing. Loki presses the side of one finger to his face and it comes back glistening.

_'Loki…'_

He's never before heard his name spoken like that.

_'Jane, tell me what happened to you.'_

Then he puts the world on mute. It's simple magic that dulls his keen senses to everything outside his own mind. The pattering of feet of maids and courtiers straying too close to his rooms, the roars and jeers of foot soldiers outside as they practice their forms, the subtle hum of magic that follows him automatically. He wants none of it, no obstructions, only her.

She's getting control of her breathing. She no longer sounds like she's been strangled, but right now, he has no greater fear than what caused her to sound like that in the first place. He has an idea, one born perhaps from that paranoia Jane once accused him of, but deep in his gut, he knows that's not what it is, and so he is not at all surprised by the name that slips from her mind to his.

_'Gavin.'_

That boy will suffer.

_'What did he do, Jane?'_

She hiccups.

_'He… we left early, like I said_. _He told me he booked a room, and we could order some snacks. He's always been so sweet, I didn't think anything of it… when we got there, he started coming on to me, but I said no, and then he got angry and…'_

She goes quiet. What happened next needs no explanation, because it's an obvious ending, and Loki remembers what he felt before. His hand rests on his stomach. It no longer hurts, but it is starting to churn.

_'I got away.'_

Loki releases a breath.

_'Did he hurt you at all?'_

_'He uh… he knocked me on my stomach. He tried to kick me, but I tripped him.'_

He almost smiles, and pride filters in through fire.

_'Then I got up and ran. I don't think I stopped running until I got home just now. Lucky my parents went out for the night. I wouldn't know how to explain this to them. It's hard enough having to tell you.'_

_'Why would telling me be hard?'_ he asks.

She gives a hollow laugh. _'Loki, this connection we have, whatever it is, it goes both ways, you know. I feel how angry you are.'_

Angry? That is a gross understatement. What Loki is feeling right now has spelled the end of entire armies. It has brought men to their knees and sucked the life from their bodies.

_'Please, don't get yourself worked up over me, I'll be fine,'_ she says.

_'How can you say that?'_

_'Well, I'm still a little shaken up, but that doesn't mean-'_

_'No, Jane, what I mean is, how can you ask me not to worry about you?'_

She answers with silence. He hears her suck back a fresh batch of tears that sting his eyes, and he fists the sheets as shivers run through their bodies. At times like this, she comes in so powerfully that it's as if she's in the room with him, and wrapping her solid form around him until they are completely entwined.

_'I just wish I could go back in time and do this whole night over again,'_ she says. If he tries to look through her eyes, he sees only the white of her wall. _'If I could tell myself what was going to happen and spare myself all of this… I just- why is it so hard to find a good guy? My mom did, and my grandma did. All my friends did, too. Is it just me? Am I cursed or something?'_

_'You're not cursed,'_ he says, for lack of anything better. Knowing her, she'll appreciate the effort.

_'Maybe I'm just meant to be alone,'_ she says. _'I always feel most at home when I'm researching, and I have yet to meet a guy who really understands or cares about this stuff as much as I do.'_

_'I don't think anyone could care as much as you.'_

A sparkle of warmth flits across so fast that he could have missed it if he had even one distraction.

_'That's sweet of you, Loki,'_ she says, and then she sighs audibly. _'I don't know what I'd do without you.'_

Loki's chest swells in ways it never has before. He cares not for the waves of mortification that accompany the confession (she hadn't said that to him, she'd thought it to herself, or tried to anyway), or the fear and trepidation born of his own mind and body, that urges him to back away now before he falls in too deep. The thoughts he is thinking, has been thinking for some time, can only spell ruin for the both of them. If he had any common decency, he'd never entertain them at all.

He spends the night doing just that, long after Jane has wiped her eyes and succumbed to sleep. It is as it was before: he has no honor.

* * *

He waits a week. Seven days and seven nights.

He wanted to do it that very night, when she fell gently away from him and dreamed the peaceful dreams of a still innocent mind.

Yes, in her own way, she is still so innocent. That's why he has to take this slowly.

When the seventh day has died, he rests on his back in his bed. Her slow, light breath tickles his ears. She mumbles every now and then, words that are not words. Whatever they are, they sound happy. She is having a good dream that is about to get much better.

Without hesitation, Loki dives in.

* * *

Jane is on a beach, walking against the sunset with sand between her toes. Some part of her brain that cannot function in this state would remind her that she lives over a hundred miles away from a beach, and that it takes forever to pick granules out of her toenails. She should spare herself the imaginary trouble and dream up a pair of flip-flops.

Her dream world shakes and expands, becoming more than a dream.

_'He's here,'_ a voice says, one she cannot be sure is of her own making (that's one of the downsides of having a telepathic connection to someone).

Jane turns around, feeling him at her back though he casts no shadow. He's not exactly dressed for the beach, she notes. He's at least gotten rid of that armor for now. Clothed in a dark green tunic and loose fitting pants, with pitch black hair that he has cut short, he's like a drop of ink on a canvas.

"You ever wonder why we don't do this more often?" she asks.

"This?"

"This dream sharing thing," Jane says. "I mean, isn't it nice to be able to talk face to face?"

She alternates pointing to herself and to Loki, brushing the tunic once or twice. She keeps going back for another feel, discreetly as she can. Whatever that material is, it feels delightful. She thinks he doesn't notice, but he might just be being polite and not saying anything.

His eyes on her are intense and focused, like she's the only person in the world to him. Jane once sneaked a peek at her mother's stash of trashy romance novels and scoffed at the bloated portrayal of the male leads and their 'burning eyes' and 'aching need.' Those phrases don't seem so stupid now.

"Jane," he says, his voice hoarse. He takes one step. "I know why you haven't found a man worthy of you."

His movement is unexpected. Jane's fingers brushed his tunic, only to then be pressed into his stomach. She snatched them away, not before noting the hard lines of his muscles. Her body tingles and her eyes linger at the base of his neck, which that unlaced collar does nothing to hide.

She should have dreamed of a ski resort. It's getting much too warm on this beach.

"You know why…" she stops. She doesn't know why she's repeating his words, or what she can say that comes straight from her and what she is feeling. She doesn't know anything except for how close he is, too close, but she can't pull away.

"I do," he says. "And you do, too."

Her lips parted, sucking in air to fuel the pounding of her heart. Then his lips meet hers, gentle at first, but with a ferocity that is the final nail in the coffin to whatever doubts remained within Jane of who and what he was.

He was Loki, the voice in her head. Her confidante. Her best friend.

And the only man she's ever loved.

Their kiss may last forever, or it may last just a few seconds. In a dream, it's all the same. Before Jane knows it, they're rolling in the sand, which starts to feel more like bed sheets.

"I want you to know how I feel for you," Loki murmurs while trailing fiery kisses from her throat to her ear. "I want to show you, but we can stop now if you're not ready."

Jane knows he really means it. He'll be a monster if she lets him, but only if she lets him. She knows him well enough at this point. She trusts him. And she wants this more than he could ever know.

She tells him not in words, but in the way she grinds into him and paws at his shirt. It seems tighter on him since she last checked. The stupid thing just won't come off.

Loki chuckles at her eagerness, and when the shirt evaporates with the rest of their clothes, Jane isn't sure if she can chalk it up to magic or just dreams logic. For once, she couldn't care less.

"I love you," she says. She pants it again and again while he's taking her, and he always answers in kind.

"I love you, too, my Jane."

Yes, she is his Jane, and he is her Loki. They are for each other, and Jane will never fear a life of loneliness, with only her books and the stars to keep her company again.

Come what may, she'll always have Loki, and he'll always have her. This is how it was meant to be.


	2. Part Two

**A/N: When I said before that the next chapter would be out on Wednesday, what I actually meant was Tuesday. I forgot the month started on a Sunday. So the last part will be posted on Thursday instead.  
**

**I know that after this one, you're all going to want it ASAP anyway.**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

For the next few weeks, Jane is so happy, she cannot fathom the idea that she was ever anything but. That there was ever a time when her soul wasn't filled with this flourishing euphoria is laughable to her. Surely her life was a dream until now. Never before has she felt so alive, so real and tangible. Maybe she thought she felt it before Loki and all that they had shared, but no, she'd been blind back then, blind and foolish. Now that she know what love was like—real love, not kid stuff—her eyes are open and she will never close them again.

Her final week of school she spends in the library. All her credits are completed, her grades trouncing all but those of the super genius kids. She can do what she wants until graduation, and what she wants is to know everything she can about the world Loki lives in. She wants to see what he sees and hear what he hears. That need to understand that has always been inside of her has grown beyond what she thought she knew of herself, and now, the sky's the limit.

She's already talked to Loki about meeting in person. Maybe she'll be the one to make it happen.

* * *

On the outside, their conversations haven't changed. They still call on each other at random (if more regular) intervals and they talk from dawn to dusk about whatever is on their minds. Sometimes, Jane wants to hear about Loki's family and what kind of work being a prince entails. Other times, Loki wants to understand the mortals' fascination with effeminate men who sing and dance, and why those girls Jane occasionally deigns to spend time with insist on summoning banshees with the volume of their screeches.

There is a difference, though. One that Jane can sense, if not hear, in every word they say. He's more open with her; the times that she can feel his joy or his pain are no longer happy accidents. It makes their conversations easier, lighter perhaps. They can be speaking about a subject mundane or deadly serious, and to Jane's ears, it might as well be nothing more than, 'I love you most.' 'No, I love _you_ most.'

A week goes by, and then another. They don't have any more shared dreams in this time, but Jane has enough of her own to cover for them.

On the third week, he interrupts Jane's dream of standing on the roof of the school building in her soiled prom dress. The roof becomes an Asgardian style suite, while Jane's dress becomes air. Sometime later, they rest in a golden glow, and Jane snuggles into Loki's chest. He feels so warm and solid that it'll be jarring when she wakes up in her bedroom like he was never there at all.

She draws little circles in his skin, and listens to him tell her that they won't be having more meetings like this for a while.

"Why not?" she moans, playfully grinding him.

He growls and gives her behind a squeeze, but doesn't flip them other the way she'd hoped he would.

"It cannot be helped," he says. "Vanaheim has long been a friend of Asgard. It is our honor to stand at their side whenever war rages across the land. I'm afraid that I will need to focus my energies on the preparations."

"What about your brother?" Jane asks. Loki grimaces, as he has the few other times Jane brought up Thor. She doesn't know why he would. She may not know Thor, but from what Loki tells her, he seems like a pretty good guy.

"He is a skilled warrior and brilliant in battle," Loki allows, "but he lacks subtlety. He would much rather run screaming headfirst into battle than stand back and come up with a plan first. The only reason he hasn't been killed a thousand times over is his wielding of Mjolnir. Trust me when I say that he would be lost without my tactical skill."

"Have you ever tried to teach him?" Jane asked.

Loki looked at her as though she'd just told the world's funniest joke. "Have you ever tried to teach a songbird how to swim?"

"No, that's impossible."

"There you go."

"Okay, you've got to be exaggerating."

"You don't know Thor."

Loki's hands roam, and as his fingers pinch her nipples, Jane loses all desire to talk or think about anything else. That had to be exactly what he wanted.

"Now," he says huskily, "we have the rest of the night to enjoy before I must leave you. I don't intend to end it with idle conversation."

They end it with moans and screams instead.

* * *

Eventually, they reach a compromise.

Loki refuses to budge on the dream sharing. It uses too much energy and made it harder to avoid accidental connections. The last thing Loki wanted was for Jane to wake up one morning on the battlefield watching him slit an insurgent's throat through his eyes.

They would make contact only in their waking hours, once a week as long as Loki did not have to rush into battle at a moment's notice.

_'That could very well happen,'_ he tells her, and if he thinks that's going to dissuade her from seeking him out, he's got another thing coming.

* * *

_'So, what's going on?'_

_'Jane, this might not be the best time.'_

_'Are you going off to fight again?'_

_'No…'_

_'Are you currently in danger?'_

_'Not precisely.'_

_'Meaning…'_

_'Meaning that I shall live another day, however I might not do it with my sanity intact.'_

Loki glances around the bar, where Thor and the others celebrate their most recent quelling of their rebellious foes. Said victory decimated roughly thirty percent of the enemy's forces by the estimation of their scouts. That leaves seventy percent still to come. Loki doesn't see what there is to celebrate.

He especially doesn't see cause for everyone to pour ale all over his and Thor's heads, just because they were the ones to lead the attack. Another five men now decide it's appropriate to ambush him and drench him as a unit. While they clap his back and laugh themselves into drunken oblivion, Loki releases a sigh.

_'I take it back. Forgive me, Jane, but I believe I will be drowned tonight by my own men.'_

He doesn't find that a very amusing thought, but she does, and when her laughter becomes his, the men take it as invitation to repeat the act. He is blinded by the length and thickness of his hair, and he thinks not for the first time that maybe it is high time to cut it just a little. That would please Mother, if nothing else.

_'I'm happy to provide you entertainment,' _he says dryly. It's the only dry thing about him by now.

Her girlish laugh tapers off where the masculine guffaws of Loki's comrades only grow. He does what he can to focus on the former.

_'Don't worry about it,' _she says. _'I'll tell you what, once this whole war of yours is over, we'll have another dream, and I'll provide the entertainment.'_

He likes the sound of that. He likes it very much.

_'You have a deal, my lady,'_ he says.

He can't wait to see her again.

* * *

"Jane, can I talk to you?"

Jane grabs an apple from the fruit bowl and takes a bite. The lukewarm juices aren't as sweet as they would be freshly picked, but she's hungry, so she'll take it.

"Yeah, Mom?" she says.

Her mother is a small woman, and the only adult Jane knows who can meet her eyes. Sometimes, her extended family jokingly laments that she didn't take after her six-foot-nothing father in the height department. Jane can't say she disagrees.

Where her mother is small, she is also decidedly meek. Little things frighten her, like people yelling at her on the job or Jane's father coming home late from work on Friday nights. She always makes a certain face, white with puckered lips that disappear into her mouth. She's not quite making that face now, but Jane can see the beginnings of it.

"I heard you laughing upstairs in your room," her mom says.

Jane blinks.

"I was just reading a funny book," she lies with ease. Loki has taught her much about that.

"It sounded like you were talking to someone."

Jane shakes her head. "No, I just had the TV on. You probably heard that."

"You turn on the TV when you're reading?"

"Sometimes."

Maybe she hasn't learned as much as she thinks. Her mother turns an analytic eye on Jane that makes her cough and fidget. Meek as Mrs. Joanna Foster may be, a mother is still a mother.

"Jane, I heard you talking. You're talking to someone named Loki, and this isn't the first time either."

And now Jane wants nothing more than to kick herself in the head and sink into the floor forever. How stupid did she have to be not to think, when she was living in a house with two other people who happened to be her parents, that they wouldn't walk by her door at least a few times while she and Loki were locked in some intense discussion, and wonder what the hell their daughter could be doing in there talking to herself. She should have just kept it all in her mind and never laughed out loud at one of his jokes.

Knowing that she needs to answer, lest her silence and staring with her mouth open gives her mom even more of the wrong idea, Jane feigns a look of understanding and makes a sound of relief.

"Oh, that's what you heard," she says, forcing her shoulders to loosen. "Yeah, Loki's a kid from school. I worked with him on a school project a few months ago, and sometimes we talk on the phone."

"You were on the phone," her mother says.

"Yeah, sorry if we've been tying up the line. He's a really interesting guy, Loki. Sometimes I think I can talk to him for hours."

She tries to wear a dreamy face. Maybe if her mother thinks she has a crush on the guy, she'll drop the suspicious act and go into 'girl bonding' mode where she tries to get Jane to dress up and wear more make-up and tell her absolutely _everything_about the boy.

That doesn't happen.

"You haven't tied up the line," her mother says with a sad look on her face. "If anything, the hour long call I made to the electric company while you were in your room talking to Loki did."

This is why Jane needs a cell phone. All the other kids have one, so she should, too. She knocked over_ one _measly stereo system when she was nine and now her parents think she can't be trusted around electronics.

What happens next is too blurred for Jane to remember later. With her head slowly but surely starting to throb, she makes an excuse and heads for the door. She takes the car keys with her.

She drives (they let her learn to drive but she still can't have a goddamn cell phone). She thinks about calling Loki as she's heading down Main Street to the busy part of the city, but Loki told her he was marching straight into battle when he let her go. Their enemies launched a surprise attack on the tavern, and now Loki has a horde of inebriated troops to coordinate. Better that she leaves him alone for now.

Better for him, that is. Not better for her.

* * *

Everywhere Loki looks, people are dying. A lot of those people are his, but he must give them credit where it is due. Even in their drunken state, those who fall only do so after taking ten foes with them.

He himself has the highest body count, second only to Thor. That's to be expected.

A man is attempting to perform a sneak attack. Clearly he hasn't heard of Loki's reputation as a trickster with no equal. That, or he is simply an arrogant fool with delusions of grandeur. Either way, he is dead with a dagger embedded in his throat before he's had a chance to strike.

It allows the other man, the one Loki somehow missed, to run up with a club that sinks into Loki's stomach and winds him. He is distracted for all of ten seconds, and then the attacker joins his partner.

Their blood spreads over his blade and he cleans it with a spell. He goes back into the fray with Thor at his back, the two of them an unbeatable team, and he shuts out everything that is not on the battlefield, including the sense of dread that burrows itself into the pit of his stomach.

In the back of his mind, he knows something has just gone horribly wrong.

* * *

Jane's been driving for longer than she knows, and now she's in an unfamiliar part of town, and her parents are going to kill her when she gets home. _ If_ she gets home.

She's spent the time coming up with a new cover story. Loki is still a boy from school who Jane has a huge crush on. She might even be in love with him (Jane smiles wryly), but she gets so nervous that sometimes she rehearses conversations between them so that she'll know what to say when they meet. It's really nothing out of the ordinary, is it?

Jane turns on a corner that she might kind of know, drives down a block she definitely knows… and then lurches back at sudden, raging pain like she's been kicked in the gut.

Loki is her first thought, as one hand falls off the wheel, and she skids into the path of an oncoming minivan.

Then she is spinning, and something is screeching, and pain is coming from all different directions, and Jane's last thought is that her parents are going to kill her for wrecking the car.

* * *

Jane wakes up to white light. She's probably not the first person to mistake a hospital room for heaven.

The pain in her stomach is gone, but her arms and legs and head and chest hurt enough to make up for the loss.

Her mother and father are outside, talking to a doctor. Her mother casts a glance into the room and their eyes meet.

Her mother screams.

Her father has to wait for her to stop crying and let Jane go. Then he holds her like he did when she was five and scared of the dark.

"You gave us quite a scare, little lady," he says. She was five the last time he called her that, too.

When all the tears have been shed and hugs and kisses exchanged, the doctor enters the room with a stethoscope and a clipboard. He introduces himself as Dr. Evans, and he tells Jane that she's been unconscious for thirty six hours. She was lucky to have been hit on the passenger's side (and he assures her that the woman in the other car is safe and uninjured). It means that she's escaped with her life, and a few cuts and bruises, not to mention a compound fracture of her right arm. She won't be doing any writing for the next few months.

She's in the hospital for the rest of the week, and she doesn't hear from Loki, but that's not unusual. She hardly thinks about him at all, in fact, until the day she is to be released, when a new doctor comes to her room with her mother in tow.

"Hi Jane," he says. "I'm Dr. Morgan. Your mother wanted me to come and talk to you."

He holds out a hand and Jane shakes, but there's something about this doctor she doesn't like. Call in a gut instinct.

"Are you a physical therapist?" she asks. Dr. Evans _had_suggested that she see one.

Dr. Morgan chuckles. "Well, I am a therapist, but not that kind."

"I don't understand," Jane says, but the look on her mother's face tells her everything she needs to know already.

"It's just that I heard you've been talking to people who… might not really be there."

He seems to have been looking for a delicate way to phrase that, and if so, he's failed spectacularly.

"I can't see why that would be," Jane says with a smile.

"Jane, please don't do that," her mother says. "You were calling his name in your sleep!"

Jane freezes. "Wha-what name? Whose name?"

"Loki's," her mother says. She comes into the room and sits at the side of her bed, taking her hand. Jane is too stunned to pull away. "Ever since you woke up, and even before, you keep calling out to him. One night, I… I asked you who he was, and you told me that he spoke to you in your _head_?"

She sounds disgusted on the last word, like she's secretly lamenting that her brilliant daughter with so many prospects as turned into a nutcase, and that alone sends Jane over the edge.

"Mom, you've got to be kidding me!" She nearly jumps out of bed, but her ankle still hurts like hell. "You actually think something I said while I was half-asleep means anything? What kind of answers were you expecting?"

"But Jane, this has been going on for years. You think we haven't heard it?" Now her mother is getting upset, and she never gets upset like this. "Jane, you're my daughter and I love you more than anything in the world. If something is wrong-"

"_Nothing_ is wrong!"

"Then who is Loki?"

"He's…" they're both staring at her, waiting for an answer that she can't give, and the longer they stare, the more those two pairs of eyes look like two thousand pairs. Her throat has closed up, and her head is spinning, and she can hear her mother asking, in a resigned tone of voice, if they can make it a three pm appointment instead of four.

* * *

Loki sits in his tent at the dawn of a new day. There is a battle on the horizon. This war has been more intense and bloody than he ever could've imagined. In this brief moment of reverie, it's the perfect time for him to call out to Jane. He would've ages ago, he might've even broken his vow and taken her to the world of his unconscious mind yet again.

He doesn't because of what he's just woken up from: a dream of such vividness that it is second only to the dreams they share.

In it, his Jane is in one of her moving contraptions. She calls it a car. He calls it clunky and primitive, not to mention dangerous.

Yes, it's very dangerous.

It's so dangerous, that when Jane doubles over in pain that they share, she immediately collides with another vehicle, and she spins across the street into a tree that her 'car' half uproots. While Loki sits aside the action, a red and white box shaped vehicle comes screaming down the road. Two men issue forth and pry open the door of Jane's vehicle.

Loki has lived half his life on the battlefield. He has seen more men die in more bizarre ways than he can count, but he is not prepared to see Jane ripped free from what could easily have been her grave. There's a gash on the side of her head and another on her neck. Her head lolls from one side to the other. Loki wants to cry out, but his voice doesn't work here. He can only watch, a powerless ghost, as his love is loaded into the box and carried away.

And it's all his fault.

He wakes up knowing it. This only happened because he called her in the middle of that party, right before the insurgents crashed through the doors. In that moment of senseless boredom, he had let his better judgment slip, and he had connected with her, and then he hadn't had the time to probably break away before the battle started fresh.

That dream is reality. He needs but one brush into the stream of her thoughts to know it.

She's hurt now because of him.

She almost died _because of him._

It's been a long time since Loki has felt regret like this, but if anything has come of it, it's that he knows more than ever the true extent of their bond.

Thor calls him out into the open, and Loki comes, where he would have just shooed the oaf away on a better day. Other will watch him, and whisper among themselves of how the second prince looks dead to the world, uncaring of what happens outside the confines of his mind. He looks like he's held all the light of the realm in his hands, only to have them ripped away in an instant. That's what they'll say.

And Loki will not listen. He never has before. He'll carry on until the fighting is over, without Jane Foster to rouse him in the worst of times. He won't contact her one more time no matter what is to come, and he'll hope that she understands it was all for her.

On his honor, he will not hurt her again.

* * *

The first time Jane meets with Dr. Morgan, he doesn't talk about Loki.

He asks how her day has been and how she feels about graduating. He asks about her friends and the boy in her math class whose offer for a date she rejected. She answers questions about college and what she plans to do with her life. He sounds impressed when she talks about astrophysics, like he's finally seeing her as an intelligent being rather than an experiment to pick apart.

Jane still leaves the meeting feeling like she's been babied.

He asks about Loki on the second meeting, and Jane is ready for him.

"Look, it's true that I talk to Loki sometimes," she tells him, "but it's not what you think. Loki is… I talk to him when I'm bored or frustrated, or no one else is around and I need to vent. It's motivating for me to talk to Loki. He's like, you know, an extension of myself or something like that. I feel more confident after I've spilled all my problems to him, you know what I mean?"

When he asks why she didn't tell her mother that, Jane winces (he's very blunt, this guy). She asks him to look at where they are now. Her mother would have wanted her committed if she just blurted out the truth. She's just the type to overreact is all.

Dr. Morgan doesn't believe her.

He says that he does, but Jane knows that he doesn't. It's in his eyes. The eyes say so much more than the mouth does. Another thing she's learned from Loki.

He prescribes her sleeping pills. Jane folds up the prescription slip and keeps it in her hand until she's out of his office. Then it goes in the waste bin.

The next time they meet, he has more questions.

When did she start talking to Loki?

Where did she come up with the name Loki?

Is she familiar with the mythology behind the name Loki?

Did she create Loki because she was lonely as a child?

Does she crave companionship but not know how to seek it out in the real world, and so she retreats into fantasy where no one can judge her?

Does she really understand that Loki is not real and just a figment of her imagination?

Jane goes home that day and wants to punch a wall until her other arm breaks. She can't even throw herself on the bed properly because she might break the cast. She buries her head in her pillow, releasing in a scream all the frustration that she'd rather take out on Dr. Morgan's fat, pretentious head.

When she's all done and tired out, Jane rolls onto her good side, her broken arm jutted out in her cast. It's been signed by a bunch of people she barely knows.

She looks at the clock and then the calendar. It's marked May 22nd, but it's actually May 28th. She should start marking the dates again. She needs to be in the mood for it first.

Right now, the only date she cares about is two weeks ago. That was the last time the two of them spoke, and Loki ended it abruptly when his party was ambushed.

It's about time she found out how that fight ended.

_'Loki,'_ Jane calls to him, sitting up with her back against the pillow and her head on the wall. _'Loki, can you hear me?'_

She closes her eyes and searches for him. He's taken his time before to answer, but his presence is always so powerful, like her feet tingling after they've fallen asleep. She can't feel that right now, but he has to still be around.

_'Loki, I know you're probably in the middle of something right now, but the last few weeks have been pure hell. You won't believe what my mom is making me do right now, all because she heard us talking, and she thinks…'_

Jane's eyes open of their own accord, and she stares blankly at her wall and the posters that have changed from actors and boy bands to the make-up of the stars and the Andromeda Galaxy. Her small TV in the corner is turned off, her father is at work, and her mother went out ten minutes ago for groceries. Everything is so quiet that you could hear a pin drop, but it doesn't hold a candle to the silence Jane hears in her mind.

Loki has never taken this long to answer her before.

_'Are you there?'_ she asks, sitting up a little straighter. No answer. "Are you there?"

She's been trying not to speak to him out loud anymore, that's what got her in trouble. She just needs to hear him right now, whatever it takes. He'll know it's serious if she calls him like this.

"Loki, where are you?" she looks around the room, as if he's just hiding in her closet or under the bed "Come on, this isn't funny."

He must think it is, because he's still not answering, and Jane is feeling increasingly like a child again, jumping at shadows and crying in the dark, when even the moon couldn't guide her.

"Look, if you're busy, that's okay. We can talk another time, but can you please talk to me? Just tell me you're there, and I'll be okay. Loki, please! Please say something!"

He never does.

* * *

The battles rage. The blood spills red. The death toll rises.

Loki feels it acutely in the air. They've just buried another soldier. Loki knew this one personally. He was a good man, if not terribly bright. He didn't deserve to die, though he had died well. Somewhere in the heart of the forest, their foes are mourning fifty where they mourn one.

The insurgents will be felled any day now. Their numbers are dwindling, their morale is shattered. They should have known not to take on a friend of Asgard. Where the enemy falls, Asgard rises. Thor is confident that surrender will come any day now, but his assurances do little to appease Loki.

In all the time that's gone by, he hasn't allowed himself to rest. Even now, he's going over new battle plans to be discussed with Thor and their generals later. When he's done with that, he might consider past battles and any missteps that he wouldn't want repeated. There aren't bound to be many, but one can never be sure.

Anything is better than letting his mind wander, because it will inevitably wander back to Jane. If he thinks about Jane, he'll wonder how she is now, how her healing is going. He'll wonder if perhaps he should open the channels for just a moment, just to let her know that he's thinking of her. Part of him thinks he should do it to explain why he closed off from her in the first place. He knows it wasn't fair of him to retreat without explanation.

Yet every time he thinks he'll give in, he remembers her lifeblood seeping out her wounds as she sat perilously close to the edge of Valhalla. If not that, another horn will blow, calling their armies once more into battle. As Loki rushes with Thor to the head of fray, he'll push Jane out of mind, far enough that he almost does forget her.

The war is going to end any day now. Everyone is sure of it. Then he'll have her back, and when he does, he'll never let go again.

* * *

Jane sees Dr. Morgan three more times before she stops.

Since Loki disappeared, the doctor seems less willing to pull punches with her. His questions become steadily more intrusive, and in one desperate moment after a particularly bad session, Jane wonders if Dr. Morgan is secretly some kind of wizard who broke her connection to Loki and is using their meetings for some indirect evil gloating.

Their final session starts with him asking outright if she's spoken to Loki recently.

"No," she answers. She doesn't feel like putting on a show for him today. "Seems like he's abandoned me."

It's been five weeks and six days since she last heard from Loki.

"Are you sure Loki abandoned you and not the other way around?"

Where she doesn't want to play, she also doesn't want to hear psychobabble. Next he's going to start some spiel about Jane gaining maturity by letting go of her 'childhood fantasy' and what a good step this is for her emotional development and how she should be _so_ proud of herself. Way to go, Jane!

"I never said I wanted him gone, you know."

Dr. Morgan winces. He coughs into his hand. He's done this so many times now that Jane is going to have a lifelong distrust of anyone who clears their throat when it's time to get serious.

"Well, Jane, I… can understand how letting go of certain habits can be difficult, especially when you've lived with them for as long as you have-"

Here it comes. Any second now…

"-but this is a positive thing-"

And _there_ it is.

"-this shows how much you've improved since we started meeting. It shows growth and a willingness to get out into the real world. You're a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. It's time for you to let go of your fantasies and find real, tangible people to know and love you-"

Jane gets up and walks out the door. It's a purely reflexive action that she is not going to regret when she gets home and tells her mother in no uncertain terms that she's done with therapy.

She goes to her room, passed the calendar she has yet to change, and drops on the bed with her now loosely bandaged arm out. It's become routine for her. Whenever she feels tired, no matter what time it is, she goes straight to bed, she gets herself comfortable, she closes her eyes, and she says his name once.

"Loki?"

He never answers.

Every night, her voice gets softer.

Last night, it was a quarter past one. She'd been up late finishing a book. In the dead of night, when the sky is its darkest, she could always count on his voice to calm her. She said his name, and hoped against hope that tonight was the night he returned. She could rip him a new one for taking so long to come back, and then she can meet him in their dream world and _show _him how much she's missed him.

All she heard was silence.

And in that silence, where she's started to forget the rumble of his laugh and the warmth of his touch, a horrible thought struck her.

What if Dr. Morgan is right?

* * *

Loki's room is exactly as he left it. It should be. He spelled the door to open for none but him when he left all those weeks ago.

Magic wards off the dust that comes from disuse and keeps his room cleaner than any maid could, but Loki is in no place to admire his cleanliness.

A spell mutes the euphoria of victory that permeates the realm. Loki removes his outer layer of armor with a thought. It's become heavy and cumbersome over the last month and a half. Now that the war is won, he'd be happy to spend the rest of the century in loose pants and a tunic, reading books and talking to Jane.

Valhalla above, how he has missed his Jane.

He's waited for just the right moment. She'll be getting ready for bed right now if he remembers correctly. How will it be for her to just be settling in for a good night's rest, only to hear his voice speaking her name?

He expects her to be angry with him. He can handle whatever she throws at him. Even if she chooses to ignore him for a few weeks more as punishment, he will take it. As long as she is still his.

Loki settles down on his bed (it feels wonderful after so many nights with straw blankets). He closes his eyes and reaches for her.

* * *

It's been four months, one week, and two days since Jane heard his voice.

Her cast has come off, and she's relearned how to write in near immaculate cursive (she still flubs on capital letters every now and then).

She's moved into her new dorm room. Her roommate is a party girl who likes to drag her to bars and parties. Jane met a guy there and went on one date. She's still thinking about calling him back, but she probably won't.

Her mother calls every other day, but it's clear in her voice that she wants to call more often. She wasn't happy about Jane dropping therapy, but the lack of one-sided conversations behind closed doors may have appeased her somewhat. Jane's room was a very quiet place in the weeks before she left.

She barely thinks about Loki anymore. When she does, her heart clenches, but less and less so every day.

She's gotten heavy into her studies. In the first semester alone, she topped all her science courses. Graduate school seems less and less like a distant future; Jane's professors expect big things from her. It's good to remember that she's a woman of science. A logical woman, who must think logically at all times.

It doesn't escape her notice that Loki vanished right when she started seeing Dr. Morgan. She hates to turn to psychobabble herself, but she can't help wondering if being forced to confront the issue from an outside point of view may have revealed a truth she wasn't ready to accept, that she really did have to get out more and form real relationships, because the only one she cared about existed in her head.

If it was all your head then how do you explain seeing through his eyes? She'll ask herself.

There's a lot of things that explain it, she answers. She could have dreamed all of that up like she did those times they were… together. Sure, they were vivid dreams, but she would certainly not be the first teenage girl to have a steamy sex dreams about a gorgeous stranger.

But Loki's not a stranger, her other side will say, sounding more desperate to hold on by the second. He's _real._

And then Jane will ask herself how she knows that.

It works well for her, being logical for a change. She's almost completely forgotten the way he made her feel.

_'The way you thought he made you feel,'_ she amends quickly.

On a cold evening just before mid-terms, Jane returns early from one of Carly's wild house parties. Her roommate is expected back around five or six sometime tomorrow, so Jane has the whole place to herself to finish up her paper for Advanced Physics, and maybe even get some sleep.

Her side of the room is a mess of textbooks and loose-leaf paper covered in notes. Jane grabs a few that look relevant and sets them beside the notebook where the rough draft of her paper takes up the first twenty two pages. She turns to page twenty three, pen in hand and new ideas for her closing paragraph forming.

_'Jane.'_

She drops the pen.

_'Jane, are you there?'_

It's his voice. She'd know it anywhere. His voice rings in her ears like a bell, like he's really right there next to her and always has been.

_'Jane?'_

She wonders if he can feel her heart pounding, or her stomach dropping.

She doesn't want to think about that because of what it acknowledges. Everything she's tried to convince herself of, all the walls made of common sense that she's erected over herself.

_'Jane?'_

They're crumbling.

_'Jane, answer me.'_

_"No."_

The sound of her voice shocks even her. It breaks through the ice that's crawling up her back, ice that feels secondary. Any second now, she's going to scream.

_'What…?'_

Jane's body seizes up. She can no longer breathe as everything comes to her in a whirlwind. She goes back to the first time he stopped answering her, the fear that she felt. Frustration comes next. What kind of sick joke was he playing on her, leaving her now when she needed him most?

From frustration comes more fear. It's been far too long. If this was a joke, he should have stopped by now.

Fear becomes anger. If he wants to give her the silent treatment, fine. Two can play that came.

Anger is steady for many weeks, days that mesh into an interchangeable mold. Her anger dulls it's sharpened blade. It falls somewhere deep inside and becomes fear again.

Fear.

Anger.

Frustration.

It all surrounds betrayal.

And now here he is again, like he only just spoke to her yesterday. Like these last few months have been _nothing_ to him.

"Go away," Jane says in her strongest voice. "You're not real."

Her chest hurts.

His chest hurts.

No, _her _chest hurts.

_'Jane… what are you saying?'_

Jane's healed arm shoots out and knocks over everything on the table.

"YOU'RE NOT REAL!" she screams at nothing at all. "You're not real, and I never want to speak to you again. JUST GO AWAY!"

She picks up the closest thing to her, a pillow. She throws it at the wall and it bounces off, landing on the bed. Jane goes after it, releasing into it everything she's had pent up inside of her for four months, one week, and two days, until she can't release anymore and she falls asleep from exhaustion.

* * *

Loki feels as though he's been torn asunder. Thousands of men who wanted nothing more than his blood on their blade never cut him like she has.

Jane's words run around his skull, creating an indenture. Her rage is like a slap in the face, one he knows deep down that he deserves.

He knows not what's happened to her while he's been absent, only that he has underestimated the toll it would take on her. If he'd known that she would be so angry as to reject him outright, he would have listened all those times he said, 'Just once. Just this one time while the air is quiet.'

But it doesn't matter now. It's just fine if she doesn't want to talk to him again. So says the side of him that has remained a petulant child for over a thousand years. If she doesn't want to talk to him, he won't waste his time trying to make her. He's already spent too much on that silly little mortal girl anyway.

He quite suddenly wants to rest. He withdraws from her mind as far as he can, as the last visages of her consciousness take their form at the base of his eyes.

They cry themselves to sleep that night as one.


	3. Part Three

**A/N: Sorry for the long wait, but here is the final part.**

**I hope you all enjoy!**

* * *

It gets easier to forget over time, so long as Jane fills herself with enough college courses, thesis papers, and summer internships that she doesn't have time to think of anything else.

She never calls that guy back, but she does date a few other guys when her schedule permits it. One of them she could almost call a boyfriend. His name is Daryl. He has bright red hair and glasses, and most people think he's nothing but a bookish geology nerd until he takes his shirt off to go swimming. Jane sees him on and off for four months. They have sex for the first time at the end of the fourth.

It's not so bad for a first time, though Jane finds her mind wandering for the whole act (both of them). Whenever Daryl's awkward hands close painfully over one breast, she can't help remembering those gentle fingers from her dreams.

The dreams that were just a dream and nothing more. She can't afford to go back there.

Funnily enough, it's Daryl who does the dumping a week later, though he's very nice about it. It's not so much Jane as it is what she has down below. Sleeping with her has confirmed for Daryl that he's a man's man through and through. In retrospect, Jane's not surprised (she knew that Playgirl magazine under his bed wasn't his sister's). All that matters to her is that he was definitely her first.

* * *

He can't stop thinking about her.

Every time he has a moment alone, Jane's name plays at Loki's lips. He's called her so often that it's become second nature. Though he never gets the whole name out, sometimes he'll come as close as 'Ja-' before he stops himself.

It doesn't matter if he calls her or not. She won't hear him anyway. He's made sure of that.

It's what she wants after all.

* * *

Jane leaves the grueling, mind numbing years of university behind twenty pounds lighter and three doctoral degrees heavier. She also has a new boyfriend, a doctor she meet at a seminar right before receiving her Ph.D. in astrophysics. His name is Donald Blake. He looks like he was carved out of granite by an ancient Greek sculptors, and he has puppy dog eyes and a heart of gold to go with it. He's almost too perfect, when Jane thinks about it. He shines so bright that it takes Jane four whole years to figure out what his fatal flaw is.

"It's like you're married to your goddamn work!" Jane shouts at him in the middle of their seventh or eighth argument of the week, right after she's thrown a dirty dishrag at his head. "I'm pretty sure I've seen you a combined five hours in the last two weeks, and you were sleeping most of that time!"

"I can't help it if I have an important job, Jane," he shouts back. He always gives as good as he gets. "It's not my fault you're stuck around the apartment so much. Maybe if you'd get your head out of your crazy theories and do some real work for a change, you'd understand!"

He's also proficient at low blows.

Jane moves in with her cousin until she can find her own apartment. Then she vows never to see Donald Blake again after she goes to pick up what's left of her stuff. She's pretty sure she's missing a few trinkets he kept for his office, but whatever. She's still got his favorite shirt.

* * *

Perhaps in retrospect, Loki chooses ill his method of coping.

It's not new for him to look at Thor as the personification of a boulder rolling down a hill, crushing flat everything in its path to the bottom. Unlike the boulder, Thor's blundering and thick headedness is met with near unanimous love and admiration from the people. All because he can make a few storm clouds and hit things.

Meanwhile, Loki walks every day up the hallowed halls of Asgard, and the courtiers and servants who bow to him when he passes do so with hesitance and trepidation. They drop their eyes to the floor as soon as they think he's looked away, and the breathe sighs of relief that the second prince is out of their sight again.

They never do that to Thor.

They love Thor.

Everyone loves Thor.

Why does everyone love Thor?

That's not to say Loki hates Thor, oh no. He could never hate his brother. He just wishes he wasn't the only one in the entire realm to see him for the flawed creature he is, and not just a wholly supreme and infallible being of light like everyone else. If they could only see the truth about Thor, and stop looking at Loki like he's seconds away from a murderous rampage.

"Maybe if you smiled a little more," his mother once said. She's the only person he would ever confide in, and the only one who'd ever be honest with him, too. "You wish for people to see you as approachable. Perhaps you should help them along."

And because Loki is stubborn as an ornery horse, he turns up his nose and declares that they aren't worth the effort. If they've already made up their minds about him, they're unlikely to ever change them no matter what he does. He should trade his intellect for more muscle mass and turn his hair yellow. Then they'll stop hating him.

"They don't hate you," Mother says. "No one hates you, my son."

Loki spends many days in the library, reading and studying and avoiding Thor's stupid hunting parties as much as possible and definitely not sulking. Princes don't sulk.

And Jane wouldn't want him to…

Not that he cares in the slightest what she would want.

On days when she is on his mind, he accepts his brother's invitation to join him on whatever quest of arrogance he has planned today. If Loki is busy rolling his eyes at Thor, then he's not busy thinking about Jane.

He'll take what he can get.

* * *

Jane is twenty seven years old when her father keels over in the kitchen while making a sandwich. Cerebral hemorrhage, the doctors all call it. This was always going to happen to him, it was only a matter of when.

The funeral is packed with family and friends and colleagues. Jane speaks before the gathered masses, not sure what she's supposed to say when everyone wants to listen to some spiel about her father ascending to the kingdom of God, and Jane hasn't believed in that stuff since she was a kid. It's a nice thought that she wishes she could entertain, but even now she can't find it in her.

Maybe because she knew once what was really out there…

But no, there's no time to think about that. It has no place in the life of a scientist.

(It's been six years now, and she's almost completely convinced that it was a dream.)

Her mother holds her tight as her father is put in the ground, and her father's best friend stands behind her. He tells her that her father was proud of her. Jane likes hearing that. Her father wasn't the type to say it himself, but she always hoped that he was.

After the funeral, her mother makes her promise that she'll call more often, and then she kisses Jane's cheek and tells her how she misses her little girl so much.

(They haven't been close since Dr. Morgan.)

As she's leaving, a small, portly woman in black comes and speaks in a thick accent, telling Jane that she is Erik Selvig's mother. She assures her that her father is safe now in the halls of Valhalla.

Jane thinks she must be kidding. Scandinavian people don't believe in that stuff anymore, do they? When she dies herself a month later, Erik tells her it was just his mother's impending death making her sentimental. Jane shouldn't worry about it.

That night, she dreams of a beautiful garden.

* * *

Loki is one thousand and forty eight years old, but he doesn't look a day over nine hundred. That's what a dignitary told him while suitably inebriated and possibly mistaking him for Thor somehow. It would be the first time.

Tomorrow is Thor's coronation, and Loki's not so sure his brother is ready for the burden of ruling.

Of course, he expects Ragnarok to be upon them before Thor is ready, but that is neither here nor there.

Loki has a duty to Asgard, whether she appreciate his efforts or not. He finds that he cannot allow someone so blinded by bloodlust to be placed in a position of power over the realm eternal. He still holds that he doesn't hate his brother, no matter how many times he wants to wrap his hands around his neck and squeeze, but much as he cares for Thor, he fully expects him to send the realm into chaos within a month.

That's why he is all but obligated to show Asgard and, more importantly, Odin himself, just what kind of person they are looking to for leadership. He has to let the Frost Giants in, really. He holds no love for the creatures (how can anyone love such vicious monster, he asks), but they will serve their purpose today.

He stands among the bloodshed in the aftermath, half-listening to Thor argue with Father. Two guards died fending off the siege, and Loki feels but a twinge of regret. They were valiant men, likely to die in battle anyway the next time someone came to challenge the throne. Such it was for a soldier of Asgard.

'How would Jane feel if she knew about this?' asks an insidious voice within the depths of Loki's mind, a voice he would happily squash.

* * *

Erik is the first person she calls when her sensors pick up on the anomalies. Part of the reason is she needs someone to talk to. Darcy is a good intern when it comes to organization and negotiating with Culver for extra grant money, but she's not a scientist in the sense Jane had been hoping for when she advertised for an intern. Sometimes, she thinks if she'd set up shop in New York or L.A. instead of New Mexico, she might've gotten a more decent response, but oh well.

This is clearly the place to be anyway.

Erik is skeptical at first, but he agrees to come down for a visit. He's taking time off his new teaching job and could use a vacation. He's suitably impressed with Jane's findings when she explains them to him over coffee at Izzy's diner, and he shares an aside glance with her when Darcy makes a quip about her energy being the result of 'one million mega gulps and no sleep for three weeks.'

Jane's never realized before how much she missed him.

One the night that will make Jane's life, she starts thinking of him again. It isn't a conscious decision, like it is some of the other times. She wakes up that morning and makes herself cereal (saving aside some for dinner), and she's in the middle of going over equations and theorems, when his face appears at the forefront of her mind, grinning down at her in that sensual way of his when he would lay her on the bed and…

She shakes herself back to reality, but for the rest of the day, he invades at regular moment, all the way up to that moment in the middle of the night, when all of Puente Antiguo either sleeps or hits the local tavern. She keeps her eyes on the trackers, never blinking (she'll see him if she blinks), and so intent that even Erik worries for her, but Jane brushes him off. She's fine and she knows what she's doing. This could be the breakthrough she needs and no one's going to ruin it.

Especially not him.

The air temperature spikes, and then Jane's equipment goes haywire. The winds are picking up, faster and stronger every second as something forms in the sky. A tunnel of swirling light and color descends from the heavens, and though some base part of Jane knows she should fear for her life, all she can think about is getting her camera. She'll need as much visual evidence as possible.

(Lucky for her, Darcy cares more about surviving than the advancement of mankind.)

The man who appears is at first of no interest to her, just some drunk fumbling around in the desert. So long as he's not hurt and she won't get sued, the only weird thing about him is how he could have gotten so far out of town without her seeing him. Then Darcy points her taser at him. The man is highly amused.

"You dare threaten me, Thor, with so puny a weapo-"

And Jane honestly can't say if it's the name that shocks her more or the fact that Darcy actually tasered him, and it worked!

'Loki would've loved to see this,' she thinks.

Now he's going to be on her mind for days. Great.

* * *

He walks through the halls of the sacred vault to where the casket sits, and he wonders if this is how the damned feel as they walk the long road to the gallows.

The casket burns with cold blue light. His heart races when he sees it, and he feels sick knowing that it's not just his nerves. Odin used to bring him here with Thor when they were children, and tell them stories of the monsters he defeated when they were still in swaddling clothes. He always used to feel strange about coming here. It felt like something was calling to him.

But that's impossible, isn't it?

It can't be real what he saw. Surely it was a trick of the mind. There'd been so little light to speak of on Jotunheim, and so many of those foul beasts around, baring their hideous skin to the world. When one grabbed him, he must have been seeing things. A hallucination easily explains the lack of pain.

No, it wasn't real.

It couldn't be real.

It just couldn't…

His hands grasp the casket and he prays for pain that doesn't come. Instead its power that awakens his blood, changing him from the inside out into what he was always meant to be. He opens eyes that are sharper, looks down at hands that are and aren't his own. In an instant, he can see everyone he's ever known looking upon him with scorn and hatred, finally unmasked after all these years.

The people call him a monster.

Sif and the Warriors Three prepare to skewer him.

Frigga hides her face in fear.

Thor tells him he was never his brother.

Odin says he was never his son

And Jane… Jane… the Jane he sees shakes her head at him, pity and fear and disgust most of all. She spits at him:

'How could I have ever thought I loved you?'

* * *

Jane pauses putting away some paperwork and touches her chest, over her heart where it hurts the worst. She stares ahead with tears in her eyes, and she resists the urge to scream, break something, or do both at the same time.

However she wishes to ignore it, she knows that something terrible has happened.

* * *

It's hard to pretend that Thor is just crazy. Easy to believe, and Jane would if she didn't know better, but hard to fake.

It's especially hard when it's just them on the roof, after two days of Thor worming his way into her chaotic life and making sense of it. Two days of his smile charming her, in ways that she hasn't been charmed since…

Well, it's probably just a family trait.

She doesn't tell him why she believes him. Hell, she doesn't tell him she believes him at all.

She alludes to it in her words and actions, in the way she never condemns him as nuts like Erik does. They think it's because she has a thing for him (Erik sits her down after Darcy's gone to bed and gives her a variation of the 'some boys are dangerous and just want one thing' speech she got when she was a teenager). In a way, maybe they're right. Thor is definitely a sight to see, there playing with her handmade technology while displaying his ridiculous male model body. If she'd met him first, Jane imagines, she'd be all over him. Even now, she's not immune. He kisses her hand the second time they part and she giggles like a school girl before her first crush.

The important thing is that she knows he isn't crazy. She never would have driven him to that government base if she wasn't absolutely certain that he was who he said he was, nor would she have spent the night on the roof with him, listening to an abridged version of the story she learned years ago.

'Or dreamed you learned.' Her denial has gone on for so long that it's become automatic.

'Shut up,' Jane tells it. She's on the verge of sleep and Thor is placing a blanket over her. That's so nice of him.

He thanks her, and she's not exactly sure what for, but she thinks there's a little more than gratitude in his words, and splits her in half between the Jane that wants him, and the Jane that longs to hear Loki's voice one more time.

* * *

She doesn't hear his voice, but she does hear Thor say his name when a killer robot descends on Puente Antiguo and destroys the place she's come to know as home.

* * *

It helps not to think about it, all the destruction he's causing.

Or he could just tell himself that Midgardians are insects compared to him, and killing them is no different from killing an insect. The only difference is they're bigger, and they scream when they die.

The most important thing is finding Thor. If he can eliminate that false brother of his, a thorn in his side since he was old enough to stand; if he can just show Odin when he wakes that he is the worthy son and always has been, maybe that can erase the truth of the matter.

(But in his heart that he's begun to stomp out, he knows it won't.)

He fills himself with the rush of the battle, this one-sided attack on a horde of ants and their hapless defenders. He takes particular joy in dominating Thor's friends (never his friends). All the times they whispered behind his back, or laughed when he messed up a new move while training; the times when they belittled his magic and thought him the weak link for choosing wits over brute strength.

They won't be laughing now.

(The next time he sees them face to face, they'll be laughing in triumph.)

In the end, it's down to him and Thor. Loki has seen all through blinders until now. There is only another building to shatter, another fighter to defeat, another obstacle between him and his true goal, and then, there he is.

Thor—weakened, human Thor—walks to him with the gait of a warrior. There is no fear in his eyes, or in his heart, just sadness. There is sadness in those eyes that makes Loki want to kill him more.

How dare he look at him like that now? How dare he?

And in the background, held back from the action by a man in midlife, looking more grown-up than when he knew her, but still so much the woman Loki once loved…

Thor will die thinking that his pleas are what drove Loki to end the assault. The truth is something much greater than he knows.

* * *

"I don't know what happened on earth to make you this soft!"

'How dare you. How dare you go near her?'

"Don't tell me it was that woman!"

'How dare you touch her?'

"Oh, it was?"

'I'll kill you…'

"Well, maybe when we're finished here, I'll pay her a visit myself!"

'You can't have her!'

* * *

But he always loses to Thor in the end.

* * *

Thor leaves the same way he came, minus the truck. Jane is pretty sure that if she hits him again, he pingauzer is going to wind up broken.

After he's gone, Jane doesn't know what to do with herself. She waits for long hours against the setting sun, half-expecting him to return and sweep her off her feet. The rest of her is hoping for someone else.

But she shouldn't hope for him anymore, should she? Not after what he did today.

She can't say she knows what's happened in last ten years, other than that Loki appears to have been killed and replaced by an identical, evil double. That's about the only explanation her factual and logical mind can come up with.

(The idea that he was always like this deep down inside is absurd and she's not going to entertain it.)

When it becomes clear that Thor isn't coming back, she returns to her lab and to the multiple men in suits who are going to be a fixture in her life for the next few months. She has to spend hours that should have been used for sleeping getting 'debriefed' by that guy, Coulson, and his merry band of superspies. By the time it's all over, the sun is rising, Jane's entire lower half feels like jelly, and the only consolation is that Coulson has arranged for a truckload of high tech equipment to be placed in her lab for her to locate the Bifrost with, all on SHIELD's dime. For once, Jane would've preferred sleep.

Coulson drives away in his long black car, and Jane sinks into her mattress in the back of the RV. She's going to need a new cover, she thinks. This one is all worn out and flat as a pancake.

It's only when it's quiet that Jane can stop and think about what's happened.

Thor really was the god of thunder, but she already knew that (didn't stop her from being impressed).

Loki's gone berserk and he sent a killer robot to destroy the town.

SHIELD had promised the return of her research. So far, they were living up to their word. Jane could hear Erik outside directing a truck through the back door of the lab. What would she ever do without him?

She had kissed Thor. It was a spur of the moment thing, and even as his lips were on hers, she couldn't stop comparing him to the last Norse god she kissed. Thor was more tentative, less willing to go the extra mile. Jane didn't know if it was because he was in a hurry or because there were people around, but something told her it wouldn't have changed if they were alone and had all the time in the world. He wouldn't make her feel like he'd been waiting his whole life to have her.

As Jane touches her mouth that isn't tingling, her throat closes up. It travels up to her eyes, and they sting with tears. They're like the first springs of water through the cracks of a dam that is about to break. She hears in her head the last words Loki ever said to her interspersed with the mechanical sounds of that death machine he commanded, and she cries harder than she ever has before in her entire life.

* * *

Jane cries herself to sleep over Loki three times.

The first time was when she unknowingly destroyed him

The second time was when he unknowingly destroyed her.

And the third time was when he knowingly destroyed everything else.

* * *

The power Thanos wields is like nothing else, though Loki pretends when they meet like he's only a novice.

Thanos makes him pay for his insubordination in the slowest and most painful way possible (later on, The Other will tell him that this was nothing).

As his mind is ravaged, Loki must fight to the death to hold onto whatever he can. He hides away all that is still important to him in the farthest recesses, to a place not even Thanos can reach. When Thanos is satisfied that he's made his point, he withdraws, and Loki shivers and shakes like it's his entire being that's been violated, body and soul.

But Thanos never learns about Jane. That is all that matters.

* * *

What Thanos takes is his ability to feel, and his reason.

(No, he had already lost that, he knows in his heart that won't die.)

He attacks the earth, and he doesn't know why, so he makes up some story about the lie of freedom (the burn of Thanos's last session with him lingers, and he barely knows what he's saying at all). He feels a sick sort of joy in taking the minds of these mortals, and leaving behind nothing but the same inky blackness that makes up Thanos's world. Now he's not alone anymore.

It's the only time in the whole invasion that he feels any sort of sensation. He kills as many Midgardians as he can looking for some sense that he's alive and moving, but he finds nothing.

He goes about his plan and it's laughable how easy the mortals are to fool. He wishes success came with a sweeter taste.

He threatens Natasha Romanov, and when it's over, all he can be is annoyed that he fell for her games.

He drops Thor out of the flying fortress, looks him in the eye as he does it, and this, more than anything else, should give him pleasure. This is his ultimate revenge.

He should enjoy this.

But he can't.

He's almost relieved when he loses and gets taken back to Asgard in a muzzle and chains. At least now he doesn't have to pretend anymore.

* * *

The attack on Manhattan ends in a victory for earth, but Darcy will never understand why Jane refuses to come out of her room for three days after.

Months later, she starts dating again, and everyone thinks it's Thor she's trying to get over.

* * *

Two years pass before she sees Thor again, and she can't help but think he wouldn't have bothered to come were in not for whatever this thing is inside of her that sends cops flying into buildings and makes her feel like her insides are burning away.

He takes her to Asgard. It's a dream come true for more than one reason, and it's even more incredible than she could've imagined. She walks through the town, people going this way and that, using machines that could advance human civilization by a hundred years, but to the Asgardians are just simple toys. It's really no wonder the Vikings thought these guys were gods.

Everyone is nice to her, too, or at the very least civil. Sif is a little more standoffish than the last time they met. Jane chalks it up to her affection for Thor that is obvious to her from the start, but seems to fly right over Thor's head. She thinks it's because he's known her for too long, but that wouldn't explain the sidelong glances between Fandral and Volstagg whenever Sif says something affectionate to Thor, and he misses it completely.

Jane would feel bad, but she's beginning to think she might try and make it work with Thor. Sure, there's the issue of her lifespan, and Odin makes no secret of how worthless he finds her (she'd be back on earth before she could say 'Midgard' if it weren't for the aether, as she now knows it to be called), but Thor is the sort of guy she should have been going for all along. He's sweet, compassionate, brave, and a perfect gentleman. He won't suddenly discover his sexuality like Daryl did, and he won't make her feel inferior like Don.

He won't break her heart and almost destroy her world like Loki.

That's why she needs to forget about all of that. She needs to move on and focus on what's in front of her. There is a literal handsome prince who routinely saves worlds and has eyes only for her. She'd be an idiot to let someone like that go.

She and Thor share a kiss, their first kiss since New Mexico. It's quick, it's spur of the moment, it's all she's been thinking about since he came back.

And it's empty.

It's so, so empty.

* * *

Frigga dies.

It's a terrible day for everyone, and Jane wishes she could grieve more for the woman than just for her part in her death. It's unfair that this has happened; that she had to die to protect someone she barely knew. Even when the irrational side of Jane wants to blame her for whatever made Loki turn out like he did (she blames Odin more), she had looked to this woman who was everything her mother wasn't, and wished she could have met her sooner.

At least Frigga died with honor, or so Thor says. She died defending the realms like a true Queen of Asgard. It's a small consolation prize, but if it helps Thor cope, she won't complain. After that kiss the other day, Jane is starting to realize what a good friend Thor has always been to her. He's be a best friend if he stuck around long enough.

She wants him to know that he'll always be her friend.

* * *

They're going to Svartalhiem to defeat Malekith. Sif brings her to where Thor and their guide are waiting, and though Sif doesn't name any names, she doesn't have to.

For the first time in more years than Jane cares to count, a familiar twinge is tickling her, just by her ear. It's in the place where she always heard his voice laughing or whispering seductive nothings to make her shiver.

He's here.

She enters a hall where Thor is standing, talking to someone Jane can't see behind a pillar. Time speeds up, or her feet do. Then he's in view, and for a moment, Jane can't breathe. For all the maelstrom of emotions—most of them negative—coursing through her so fast that she might explode before the aether makes her, the first thought that comes to her is that this is the first time they've ever met face to face.

What he does next makes her blood boil.

He smiles.

Like it's nothing!

And he says: "You might have heard of me-"

She punches him as hard as she can. There's a red mark on his face, though it fades much too fast. She thinks this may have been building up inside of her for years, because she's not a violent person (slapping Thor twice notwithstanding).

"That was for New York," she says, with as much force as she can without it looking phony. It was for so much more than just New York.

* * *

Though Loki knows she's coming (Thor warns him not to lay a finger on her, or he'll cut those fingers off), he's not prepared for what he sees, now with his own two eyes.

Jane Foster has truly become a woman.

Mature, beautiful, infatuated with his fool of a false brother, and if he doesn't put on that cheeky smile that most want to club him in the face for, and be as mocking as possible when he speaks to her, he's going to act on those base instincts that tell him to throw her against the wall, rip the clothes from her body, and remind her to whom she belongs.

Then she punches him.

He feels it in his body and his mind. He's almost open for her again.

"That was for New York," she says. The little wisps he gets from her mind say different.

"I like her," he says, his grin impossibly large.

By Valhalla above, he loves this woman.

* * *

Jane makes a vow that when this is over she's done with Asgardians for life. If that means being done with Asgard and all its wonders, too, it's a sacrifice she's going to have to make. If nothing else, she's learned that her physical and mental health is more important than her dreams. She's already proven herself right, so that what she has to content herself with.

Being around Loki again means the return of all that she had strived to bury. With only Thor to keep them apart, she can feel his body heat, hear his every breath and every callous remark he makes when he thinks no one hears him. He never says a word and barely looks her way, but the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, and she knows he is watching her, if not with his eyes.

Thor and Loki have a plan that she's not in on, a plan that involves saving her from a deadly inner fire, and making Loki even more of the villain. Jane won't find out about this until later. For now, the three of them stand over the mountain and Jane finds a sense of peace and calm that can't have come from within. She almost isn't bothered when Loki is ready to throw them to the wolves.

He catches Thor by surprise, sending him down the hill. Jane follows on principal. That and she doesn't want to be alone with Loki. She screams when a blade takes Thor's hand at the wrist. Loki looks so satisfied with himself, but that's the thing: he only looks it.

He picks her up. He's never touched her with his real hands before, only in dreams (and how could she have ever denied that he was the first one to hold her).

"I am Loki, of Jotunheim."

Jane doesn't know what that means, but Loki is revolted by it.

"I bring you a gift!"

He throws her to Malekith, and she lands with a gentle thud at the Dark Elf's feet. The next thing Jane knows, she's in the air.

She's floating.

She'd love to know how that works.

A long black mass emits from her mouth, ripping her throat to shreds, but releasing the rest of her from its brutal constraints. Her heart relaxes and beats strong once more. Her stomach settles, her bones cease cracking, her head clears. She can see again with her own eyes.

Malekith drops her, like a toy he has no more use for. He has what he wants now. Jane can see it, all the signs of the aether's possession (in a way, it's going to stay with her forever).

Then Thor calls off the illusion.

Jane is not shocked, not as much as she should be. She's thrown to the ground and Thor has Mjolnir. Now, Malekith will be stopped; he has to be. There's a hand on the ground over hers that she knows well. He's so close that she can hear his breaths, his heart, and everything in between.

She can hear his thoughts again.

He's thinking about her.

Jane chokes back a sob.

'It was real,' she thinks. She thinks it so hard and so desperately that he has to hear it. 'Please, tell me it was real.'

For a moment, just a brief moment in time when no one is watching, Jane places her hand on top of his and squeezes.

He squeezes back.

'It's real, Jane.'

And she loves him so much, she can't stand it.

She always has.

She always will.

* * *

But just because she knows she loves him doesn't mean she can say it. She can't even react properly when that monster takes Loki's blade and impales him with it. She can't cry out as Loki falls to the ground, shivering from blood loss, turning pale white as the light leaves his eyes, and he breathes his last words to Thor.

"I didn't do it for him."

A few moments ago, Loki pushed her out of the way of a grenade and almost got sucked forever into the void. She knows who he did it for.

Thor's cry reaches over the valley. It's empty now that Malekith has found his way to earth. They'll have to stop him on their own somehow. They'll have to leave Loki here to rot. Thor doesn't want to do it. He's like a scared child, his mother and his brother gone within hours of each other. Jane pulls him along, because she'll break down herself if she doesn't keep going.

She can't afford to wonder at the lack of pain in her chest. She's always assumed that if one of them died, the other would feel like they were dying, too. Perhaps she was wrong.

Unless…

* * *

Of course, they do win in the end. There is little to say about that.

The next few nights are plagued with dreams. They're all of him. All of them see Loki fall at the hands of his mother's killer, if not before turning the tables and taking Kurse with him. His corpse turns gray and gathers dust long after Thor has been forced to leave him. Time moves quickly, like a film on fast-forward. Suddenly, the body twitches. Loki's gray skin fills with color. He sucks in air and sits up. He looks all around; looks at his chest were his heart still beats.

He's alive.

He wasn't supposed to be alive.

This might be an inconvenience.

Of course, he wouldn't have the reputation he does if he wasn't adaptable. If both Valhalla and Hel have chosen to reject him, he'll simply have to work with the hand he's been dealt. In the guise of a lowly foot soldier, he returns to Asgard. He tells Odin of his false son's death. He thinks that might be grief that flits across Odin's face before he falls deep into Odinsleep, but it must be his imagination. No matter.

Odin's body hidden deep in the catacombs, Loki takes his form, and his rightful place on the throne of Asgard. He hears Thor give up his claim, because he's found a new calling that means more to him than power. That's just fine. Thor may leave believing that he has found a way to reach his unreachable father. He may even keep Mjolnir. Loki no longer has need of it.

So that's the end of it. His victory is complete. He has the throne, he has the power, and he has the respect and fealty of those who once scorned him.

All that he's lost is everything.

And Jane bears witness to it all.

* * *

Every night it's that dream, so vivid and strong.

Every morning, she wakes up sick to her stomach. She runs to the bathroom and keeps her head in the toilet until she has nothing left to expel. Then she spends the day walking around her London flat in a daze, barely speaking, barely working, only half-listening when Erik talks about the atmospheric anomalies caused by the Convergence.

Nobody understands what's bothering her. They never do, and it's better that way. Darcy can think all she wants that she's just a lovesick puppy pining for Thor, and Erik can believe she's suffering some kind of temporal jetlag. It saves Jane one hell of an awkward conversation.

Then one day, it happens.

It's a morning that should be like any other. Darcy lazes about with Ian; Erik wants to talk to her, but can't; Jane sits at the kitchen table until it's time for bed and one more dream.

All of a sudden, the Bifrost lands on her balcony. Someone is coming.

Jane may not be sleeping so well, those dreams take a lot out of her. She thinks for a moment that she sees green, and that's why she runs. She's forgotten herself for a moment. She's just so desperate, she needs to be right that he's alive and that what she sees when she sleeps is real.

She jumps into his arms. Kisses him. She knows instantly that she was wrong. This is not Loki holding her. This is not his body she's wrapped herself around.

She breaks away and it's Thor that's grinning at her with kiss bruised lips.

She feels like crying.

* * *

In the end, she can no longer pretend she can change the past.

She sits Thor down in the early evening when everyone else is out. She thanks him for all that he's given her, tells him that she'll never forget it, but what they have isn't what he thinks it is, or what she had wanted it to be. She tells him everything except the reason why, and in the end, he doesn't ask. Jane is grateful for that. He seems shocked and confused and maybe a little hurt, but Thor is a gentleman through and though. He says farewell with a shake of her hand, and then he is off, flying through the open window at warp speed. He's out of sight in seconds.

Jane is never going to see him again.

* * *

Darcy thinks she is absolutely insane. Erik is glad that there will be no more gods around, though he hides it well. Ian is new to this and doesn't really have an opinion.

Jane honestly doesn't care how they feel about it. She's relieved, and that's all that matters to her.

She avoids all contact with her friends for a few days. She stays in her room with her books and that letter from Stark Industries that she hasn't opened yet. She lays on a bed covered in notebook paper and that other letter from SHIELD that she did open. She has to answer soon.

There have been some exciting developments in her life, even more than getting to see another world and having the gall to break up with a physical god (who's really an alien anyway). It looks like Jane will be getting the recognition she so richly deserves. Tony Stark himself wants to meet with her to discuss manufacturing a bridge, and his emails mention another doctor interested in working with them. Considering all the recent articles about him and Bruce Banner hanging out, she has a good idea who he's talking about.

It's funny to think of how the old Jane would be wetting herself with excitement over all this. Her theories have been proven, she's being taken seriously, and some of the most famous and respected scientists in the world want to work with her, even ones not in her field. This is a dream come true. No, this is better than a dream. This is like dying and ascending to heaven. This is her life's work realized at last. This is all she has ever wanted since she first learned there were worlds out there like her own.

This should make her happy; so, so happy.

Only… it doesn't.

It doesn't.

Jane tosses the letters aside. She holds a pillow to her chest, so she has something to hold when she can't take it anymore.

She closes her eyes.

'Loki?' It's been so long, yet his name is still familiar. 'I know you can hear me. I know you're still alive. If you were really dead, I would have felt it.' She sucks in a breath. 'I left Thor. I told him I didn't feel that way about him anymore, but the truth is I never did. Everything about him, it reminded me of you. I know that now. I was just trying to hold on to whatever part of you I could. I thought it was fate that he fell into my lap, and maybe it was, just not in the way I expected.'

Jane rolls over on her side away from the door. She begins to speak out loud.

"Everything is going well for me, I guess. People are finally listening to me, and I feel like I should be out there now reveling in being right all along. I know that's what you would me to do, but I can't, Loki. I can't do that. Maybe I could have if we never met, but we did, and we can't take it back." Jane looks up. No one is there. She shakes her head. "I don't want it anymore, any of it. I don't want prestige or recognition. I don't want Asgard. I don't even want to be right. All I want is to be with you again. Do you hear me? I just want you."

It's coming now. She won't be able say any more. She'll be too busy crying.

"Please, Loki," she hugs the pillow so tight that the seams rip. "Please say something. Please, please, answer me."

She keeps repeating that well into the night.

* * *

He sits upon the gilded throne, looking out at the realm slowly returning to its former glory after a devastating battle. It's not the first Asgard has seen and it won't be the last. Soon, it will be roaring with life again as countrymen and soldier alike convene to drink and be merry. All will be well until the next war comes along. They all know this. It's a way of life for them.

Surely, they are grateful. Their king is stronger than ever. He's risen from the ashes of the Queen's death to usher Asgard into a new age. The only strange thing anyone notices—aside from Odin's shocking acceptance of the crown prince's abdication in the wake of the tragedy—is the way he takes time to stand by the window in silent contemplation, dull to the world around him.

Sometimes, a tear falls from his single eye. They can't see beneath the illusion, where two healthy eyes shed them as one.

They can't hear what he hears.

'I don't want it anymore-'

They can't feel what he feels.

'-the prestige, the recognition-'

They don't see his heart.

'I don't want Asgard…'

'I just want you.'

* * *

It's been three months since the Convergence. Jane has decided that the cold London fog isn't for her and is planning a return trip to Puente Antiguo. Everything about it reminds her of Thor, and everything about Thor reminds her of Loki. She doesn't want to be reminded of Loki, but at least New Mexico is warmer, and dry.

If she spends her whole life there doing nothing but staring out the window wondering what could have been, so be it. Her research is already off the ground and her name is in all the scientific journals. People will be talking about her for centuries to come as they plan their family vacations to Alfheim and Vanaheim. She's done her work, now she just wants to rest.

Only she can't rest, not yet. First, she has to get through all the meetings with Tony Stark regarding her contributions to the Stark-Foster project. He's a pretty cool guy, Mr. Stark, when he's not being a gigantic ass, which is often.

Jane thinks she would like him more if he wasn't already friends with Thor. He's nice enough not to bring him up (beyond introducing her to people as Jane the God Tamer), but just knowing that Thor could be in Stark Tower—or Avengers Tower as it's fast coming to be known—at any given moment is not something she's prepared to deal with. Needless to say, she takes a lot of walks by herself.

She sticks to the Central Park area, and only when the sun is out. She's depressed, but she doesn't have a deathwish. Happy families and businessmen with their phones and gossiping school kids alike file past her as she moves like a ghost, gliding more than walking. She never has a destination in mind, just 'away from Stark Tower,' 'away from Thor,' or 'away from everything.'

She can't wait to get out of here.

One afternoon, she gets lost. She'd been up for hours last night because Tony insisted on showing her some schematics he'd drawn up. She decides around five or six to sit down and close her eyes for a few minutes. It's 10:30 when she wakes up. All the families and businessmen with their phones and gossiping school kids are gone.

Jane feels a chill through her windbreaker. She walks until she's close to the park entrance, so all she has to do is get there without looking at or talking to anybody and she's home free. She keeps steady in case someone is watching. No sudden movements. The city lights blanket the stars in darkness. Not seeing them brings a sense of unease that all the mortal danger in the world never could.

She sees the gate, a few prostitutes stand around smoking cigarettes and eyeing their next john. In the next moment, there's metal pressed into Jane's back, and a hand over her mouth.

"Don't scream," says a raspy voice puffing smoke in her face. "Gimme your money and don't say a word."

Jane fights to stay calm. She hands him her whole purse. Reaching into it is liable to get her shot. He snatches it away and dumps her things out into the dirt. Keeping the gun trained on her with one hand, he goes through them with the other. He throws some important notes into the mud like they're garbage. In her wallet is one hundred and twenty dollars and some credit cards, most of which are maxed out. He takes them anyway.

"That's all I've got," Jane tells him. Why hasn't he removed the gun yet?

He grins with yellowed teeth.

"No, babe, that's not all you got."

He pushes her down. Jane screams and fights him off. She has a small knife in her back pocket. If she can just reach it…

But the man has decided he doesn't like prey that won't cooperate. The gun barrel moves to her chest.

Jane hears a bang.

And feels.

Nothing.

* * *

Loki feels everything.

He's in Odin's chambers, sleeping in Odin's bed after another day on Odin's throne. It's another day of ignoring Jane's pleas, and knowing she is better off never seeing him again. In the end, he'll only hurt her like he has everyone else. It's for the best that he stays in his world while she stays in hers. Really it is.

He feels the pain as if he's the one under attack.

He clutches his burning chest and rolls off the bed. It's excruciating, unlike anything he's ever felt before in all his years of warfare and magic. Not even a nearly killing blow felt like this. Not even falling off the Bifrost felt like this.

Nothing has ever felt like this, this feeling of a life slipping away through his fingers.

"Jane…" he gasps out.

The servant who comes to wake him an hour later finds only an empty room.

* * *

There's someone holding her, the cold of their hands seeping through her damp plaid shirt. She finds herself pressed into a hard body clothed in armor. A voice speaks in frantic tones, but she's long since gone into shock, and it's hard to focus.

"Jane, stay with me," she thinks it says. It sounds nice, that voice. She thinks she knows it.

"Loki…"

Is that her talking? It can't be. She sounds so weak.

"Jane, I'm here now. You're going to be all right."

She opens her eyes as much as she can. They've gotten really blurry. She may need to look into some glasses or just start eating more carrots. Someone is standing over her, but it's not the man who shot her. He's in a heap next to a tree, and that might just been pieces of him and not the whole. A bright, golden light sits on her chest, spreading warmth up and down her body, unless that's the shock again. Jane can't tell. Her head is spinning much too fast.

She opens her mouth, but her throat is parched. All she can manage is a hiss that sounds like his name.

'Jane, can you hear me?'

She can, and her head clears just enough at the sound of him. Jane doesn't know if that's his magic or her will or something else entirely, and she's not in a position to think on it.

'I hear…' she tells him. She fights to stay awake. She's getting kind of tired.

'Don't even think about going to sleep until I'm done, do you hear me? Do as I say!'

So authoritative, he is. Jane could laugh if it didn't hurt so much. She smiles anyway. She hopes he smiles back.

'I thought you'd never come,' she tells him.

'Forgive my lateness.'

The pain is receding slowly. So is the warmth. It's much too cold out. She should have brought a heavier coat.

'I'm sorry, Loki…'

'What?'

Jane fists the grass and the dirt. She thinks that whatever he's doing is helping, but she can't be sure if the lack of pain means she's healing or…

'I'm sorry…' Everything's getting dark. 'Sorry I… made you leave… sorry I said what I did… I didn't mean it.'

'I know, Jane,' he answered after a time. 'You have no need to apologize. Now don't close your eyes. I'm not yet finished. Stay awake.'

'I don't think I can.'

'No! Don't say that. You're going to make it, I swear to you.'

'I knew you didn't die… I knew we'd feel it… if the other-'

'Be silent! You are not dying, Jane. Do you hear me? Jane, answer me!'

'I love you, Loki… I always have… always… will…'

'Jane, NO!'

A blank white wall. A bed of silk sheets. A light breeze.

These are the sights and sensations that rouse Jane into wakefulness. She has no idea how long she's been unconscious, or if she isn't still unconscious and dreaming, or if she isn't dead and in some kind of an afterlife.

No matter where she is, what matters most is the hole in her chest, or lack thereof. Jane touches the area where she was shot. She feels smooth, undamaged skin that she's never known to be so flawless. There's a full length mirror in the corner of the room, which is decorated like a cross between an Asgardian parlor and her old bedroom. Above the bed is a panoramic view of the stars she saw every night above the Puente Antiguo sky, as if the ceiling had been removed to let in the night.

Jane approached the window by the bed. Outside was light in contrast to the ceiling, and it was definitely no part of New Mexico she had ever seen.

She didn't think was America at all. Or earth for that matter.

She steps into a magnificent garden, with rows of topiaries as far as the eye can see, and fresh fruit growing on every tree. The grass is the purest shade of green, like they've never known a day of drought. Jane's bare feet curl around the cool blades. She savors the feel of it as she does the breath in her body. She never thought she would feel anything again.

"I wanted to protect you."

Jane turns. Loki is sitting on top of a boulder, his back to her. He has shed his armor and wears the simple green tunic Jane remembers from their first night together.

"After everything that's happened, I thought it would be best if you never had to see me again."

Jane walks to him. He's too high up for her to reach, but she knows he'll come down. She knows everything about him.

"And now?" she asks.

He doesn't fail her. In an instant, he's beside her. With their minds fully open, she can almost drown in the feel of him. His thoughts and his feelings and his very essence flow through her with intensity that she can hardly fathom, and she can only hope that her own feelings are just as overwhelming.

From the look in his eyes, she imagines they are.

All of this, and they haven't even touched yet.

"Now," he says, his voice echoing in the air and in her mind. "Now, we will have all that we have ever wanted, for as long as we wish it."

Jane meets him halfway, joining with him at the fingertips. The barest of skin to skin contact is like an electric current that runs through them and makes them one. They hold each other for the longest time, just standing there at first. Then they are sitting, and then they lay in the grass. Never do they part, never do they move, until the day becomes night and a cacophony of stars Jane has never before seen is revealed. She watches them twinkle, their beauty enticing and their origins a mystery. So many new ideas about their names and properties fill her scientific mind with such speed that Loki can't keep up. He chuckles.

"Relax, my love, we have all the time in the world."

She buries her grin in the crook of his neck. He's right about that. This place, in this tucked away corner of the universe, with its bountiful garden and trees that shade them, belongs only to them.

Their world.

Their home.

"It's all ours," Jane whispers. She raises her head to meet his gaze and close the gap between them.

"Yes," he says at the last second before their lips meet. The final word projects into her mind.

'Ours.'

* * *

Padded footfalls mark Eir's entrance into the chamber where Odin sleeps. His remaining son stands vigil at his side, as he has for the past day and a half, since he was discovered in the catacombs after a long and tireless search. Though Thor asked to be left alone, not everyone chooses to listen. Those who don't are his closest friends, the ones he would not turn away. Eir doesn't know if she can count herself as such, but as a healer it's her job to be here. No magic in the universe can end an Odinsleep before it is time. Even so, she will see to it that her king remains as well cared for as he has been. If she could give Loki anything, it's this. He made his father comfortable while parading around with his face.

"My prince," she says gently, though that title might not be so fitting anymore. "Is he well?"

"As well as he can be," Thor says. His voice is heavy and older sounding, like Odin himself is speaking through him. He sounds like a man with nothing left.

Eir can understand that. The last of Thor's family lies on this bed, toeing the line between continued life and Valhalla. It can't be easy to watch so soon after the loss of the queen.

"Has he been found?"

Eir tenses. Though the name is unspoken (it has become forbidden among the people), her prince's meaning is clear. It stems from a love he will never be free of.

"They have found nothing," Eir says. "Not a trace of him. Even Heimdall can't find him."

"That is not surprising," Thor says. Years ago, he would have beamed with pride in his brother's ability. "He has always been good at hiding. If he doesn't want to be found, he won't be."

There is another explanation for Loki's disappearance, one that is perhaps more sensible than just another one of his tricks, but Thor has lost enough already. For now, Eir won't speak of it.

"And what of the mortals?" she asks.

Thor's wide shoulders heave.

"They are well," he answers, "well enough since Jane Foster's vanishing. They have ceased searching for her, and it is believed that she did indeed die in the spot where her blood was found."

"But there is no body," Eir says.

"It's quite odd, I know." A gust of wind filters into the room and tousles his hair. Outside is a cool night in Asgard's major city. The people in town are at a loss for whether to fear for the future of their king or celebrate his rescue and the ousting of the usurper, so in the end they do nothing at all, except for what they would on any other day. Eir finds she prefers this method of coping most of all. "I had an interesting conversation with my friend, Erik Selvig."

Eir looks up. She quietly scolds herself for getting lost in thought when her prince (her soon to be king) is speaking.

"I see," she says, though she can't say she cares for the words of a mortal. Jane Foster was a special case; she doubts the woman's intelligence spoke for the rest of her people.

"He told me something extraordinary," the prince goes on, hands clasped behind his back. "He told me that he had spent many nights fretting over Jane's fate and fearing the worst. However, the night before last, he had strange and vivid dream of her. He saw her, alive and well, walking through a garden in a land he didn't know. He said he had never seen a more beautiful place in all his life. He could tell me little else, but he felt that it was more than just a dream. He believes that Jane is well, wherever she is now, and that though he may never see her again, she is happy, and so should he be happy."

Eir says nothing. She's glad Thor isn't looking her way so that he can't see her scoff.

"The mortals have active imaginations," she says.

"That they do."

He goes silent, and Eir would take that as a sign to excuse herself and go, but when she is almost to the door, Thor speaks again.

"Had I not the same dream the night before my visit to earth, I would have taken Selvig's words for wishful thinking."

He spares Eir not a glance, though she is staring at him with wide eyes. He looks out at the sky.

"I think Darcy Lewis may have experienced a vision as well," Thor muses, mostly to himself. "She seemed brighter when I saw her, more like her old self. I was happy to see it."

He greets Huginn and Muninn as they perch on the window sill. While their master sleeps, they keep watch over the realm in his place. They observe Odin's inert form and unleash a series of caws that Eir cannot decipher. She doubts Thor can either, at least, not yet. His queer little smile as he sees them off has to have a different meaning.

"My prince, may I speak freely?"

"You may."

Eir clears her throat.

"Could it be that there is more to this dream than you are saying?"

Thor looks at her. She can identify that face for the knowing look it is. Eir is reminded of how much Thor has matured these last few years. He has never known so well the art of speaking without words. He will make a fine king.

"It's getting late," he says, standing. "I think you've left your apprentices without their teacher for long enough."

"Yes, perhaps I have," Eir says, and she goes in peace. He's given her all the answers she needs.

When he's alone, Thor takes his father by the hand, waits to feel his slow but ever present pulse, and then leaves him to his rest for another night.

He walks to the window, looking to the stars, away from the city. Out there is a vast and fathomless space that some mistake for empty. He knows that it's not, and he thinks that if he looks our far enough, for long enough, he might see a certain man and a certain woman locked in an endless embrace. If he listens, he might just hear their laughter.

And in the end, that's good enough.


End file.
